I have no idea whether their design is fully accessible or not (I think there are a couple of places to improve – I’ll mention those). I’ll have to check it out – but I may not get a chance to this year, since I’m writing this on the next-to-last day of the Tour de…
Read More Web Design and the Tour de FranceToday happens to be a “work from home” day, given the heat in Georgia and that my pressing matters can be dealt with by email.[1]I say this fully recognizing the blessing of having a job where I can do my work remotely. Not everyone is so fortunate. Email is the joy and curse of many…
Read More What to do on a “it’s too hot to work in the office” dayPart 1 of a series about productivity in life and as a department chair… without going too far off the edge! There’s plenty of advice out there on creating the basic to-do list. There are lots of different programs and apps, the bullet journal concept, as well as many different concepts one can buy and/or…
Read More Supercharging the to-do-listIt feels like it’s a one-sided relationship between you two… I’m hoping that you both will work with me here. Parallels really wanted me to install Windows 11. And if you look at the Parallels website, it says that I can. As I mention elsewhere on this site, I have a mid-2015 MacBook Pro. But…
Read More Dear Microsoft and Parallels,Or what happened when I spent an afternoon reviewing all of the classes in my department…. The perfect pre-Christmas nerdy project: if I could reorganize all of our classes with different numbers, how would I do it? And why do it in the first place? The answer to the latter question actually comes from something…
Read More Making course numbers mean somethingTo members of administration and others: there are actually interesting academic discussions that take place on Facebook. A few days ago, I learned about one of them: tapered scoring in debate tournaments — particularly British Parliamentary Debate tournaments. In a nutshell, here’s the basic argument: all rounds don’t count equally when it comes to deciding…
Read More So I learned something (academically) new on Facebook: Tapered ScoringIn other words, the epistemology of “the top competitors at a given tournament.” When we tiebreak a final, we’re asking how to determine the top 6 (or so) speakers at a particular speech tournament, or ways of distinguishing between several teams that may have the same debate record. But how do we know who those…
Read More Another nerdy tab post: What’s the point of speaker points in forensics?So the following actually happened at a Vocal Viking tournament. One debater apparently couldn’t debate during round 3[1]Why? I still don’t know., so the debater’s partner debated “maverick” (in other words, by themself). Speechwire requires that each speaker receives at least 1 speaker point (that way, the program knows you didn’t accidentally forget to enter…
Read More Nerdy tab post: when is a team’s seeding not right?When you subscribe to various productivity lists, you start seeing some of the same applications pop up over and over. For example, quite a few productivity sites are into personal knowledge management apps such as Obsidian and Craft. I still don’t see how those apps will help me do my work, so I haven’t given…
Read More The Arc browser: Why add another browser?Yes, my previous post about Penn Holderness has inspired me to write this post about the old ICTM math contests. Let’s also be honest… this also serves as a reminder to do a “brain dump” and write down things I remember, as well as to give myself a reminder to find my old ICTM contest…
Read More A love letter about the ICTM Math Contest